The Yellow Mountain-Chinese Baptism

Friday morning I awoke to the quiet footsteps of workers carrying bamboo poles with huge bags of heaviness swinging pack and forth on either end as they trek up the mountain past my hiding/camping spot, I quietly role up my sleeping bag and eat some breakfast as I hear the first tour groups approaching the gate that I walked around last night. As I walk out of the woods onto the trail leading towards..., well I really don't know, but it goes up... I run into a group of four people also going up the trail. One waves at me and another hits them on the shoulder, telling them that I just came out of the woods cause I was going to the bathroom... this actually was true, but not the only reason. As they politely ignored me I followed them up the trail trying to figure out what language they were speaking. Turns out the Shanghai dialect sounds quite like Japanese.

A couple minutes later I started talking to them and began a conversation which would end up lasting for the whole day and into the next!

I wasn't going to meet my friends until noon the next day so the invited me to join them.

Hiking with Chinese people is different that hiking with anyone I have hiked with before. The first thing that you do is eat 黄瓜 or cucumbers, then we hiked more.

My new found friends had never hiked a mountain before in their lives, they road the train and elavators to work in Shanghai and then decided to go hike a mountain!

The rest of the day was gorgeous, clear blue skies, clouds floating somewhere below us like an ocean with mountaintops poking through like breaching whales.

We hiked all day sharing raisens, chinese dried meat and soysauce eggs. Lots of people took my picture and I did a photo shot with a pack of giggling college girls from Chengdu, my new friends were great starting to answer questions for me. Yes he speaks Chinese and is wearing a big backpack. It was really nice to be protected from having to answer the same questions over and over again. They even started to try to collect money for me from people who wanted to take pictures of me. Along the way we ran into a bunch of people that they met on their bus ride the day before.

That night it started to rain and my tent was in America so they insisted that I stay in their hotel room with them. They had arranged a room with 5 beds and only had for people but when we got there it turned out that one of the beds was built for three...there were two couples and me...I camped on the floor in my sleeping bag. It was really fun to joke around with them and the first time that i have ever camped on the floor of a mountain top hotel room.
I will attach some pictures above.